Primary Tile

The UWP has three types of tiles

• Basic: Icon, short name
• Semi-live: Icon, short name, badge
• Live: Icon, short name, badge, content, app icon, badge

For semi and live tiles there are various ways to update them

• Scheduled: schedule a datetime to update the tile
• Periodic: pull from url to update the tile (30 min, 1h, 6h, 12h, 24h)
• Local: from device foreground or background 
• Push: from push service 

below we create a simple UI to update a semi-live tile's badge, that's the little count number that appears in the lower right corner

<Page

    x:Class="pc.BadgeUpdateExample.MainPage"

    xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"

    xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml">

    <Grid Background="{ThemeResource ApplicationPageBackgroundThemeBrush}">

        <StackPanel VerticalAlignment="Center" HorizontalAlignment="Center">

            <TextBox x:Name="BadgeCount_TextBox" PlaceholderText="Badge Count"/>

            <Button x:Name="Update_Buton" Click="Update_Buton_Click" Content="Update"/>

        </StackPanel>

    </Grid>

</Page>

Just a text box for the tile number and an update button, Below we have the codebehind to update the tile/

using Windows.UI.Xaml;

using Windows.UI.Xaml.Controls;

using Windows.UI.Notifications;

using Windows.Data.Xml.Dom;

namespace pc.BadgeUpdateExample

{

    public sealed partial class MainPage : Page

    {

        public MainPage() { InitializeComponent(); }

        private void Update_Buton_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)

        {

            var type = BadgeTemplateType.BadgeNumber;

            var xmlDoc = BadgeUpdateManager.GetTemplateContent(type);

       

            var elements = xmlDoc.GetElementsByTagName("badge");

            var element = elements[0] as XmlElement;

            element.SetAttribute("value", BadgeCount_TextBox.Text);

           

            var notification = new BadgeNotification(xmlDoc);

            var updator = BadgeUpdateManager.CreateBadgeUpdaterForApplication();

            updator.Update(notification);

        }

    }

}

Updating the badge number is very simple, we can also still leverage the old templates here's a link to a library of them.

using Windows.UI.Xaml;

using Windows.UI.Xaml.Controls;

using Windows.UI.Notifications;

namespace pc.TileUpdateExample

{

    public sealed partial class MainPage : Page

    {

        public MainPage() { InitializeComponent(); }

        private void Update_Buton_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)

        {

            var type = TileTemplateType.TileWide310x150Text02;

            var xmlDoc = TileUpdateManager.GetTemplateContent(type);

            var xmlString = xmlDoc.GetXml();

            /*

            <tile>

                <visual version="4">

                    <binding template="TileWide310x150Text02" fallback="TileWideText02">

                        <text id="1"></text>

                        <text id="2"></text>

                        <text id="3"></text>

                        <text id="4"></text>

                        <text id="5"></text>

                        <text id="6"></text>

                        <text id="7"></text>

                        <text id="8"></text>

                        <text id="9"></text>

                    </binding>

                </visual>

            </tile>

             */

            var nodeList = xmlDoc.GetElementsByTagName("text");

            var strings = new string[]

            { "One", "Two", "Three", "Four", "Five", "Six", "Seven", "Eight", "Nine" };

            for (int i = 0; i < nodeList.Length; i++)

                nodeList[i].InnerText = strings[i];

            var notification = new TileNotification(xmlDoc);

            var updator = TileUpdateManager.CreateTileUpdaterForApplication();

            updator.Update(notification);

        }

    }

}

In short just remember all of the old Tile templates are still available to you